I have met quite a few young people who were adopted from other countries by American moms and dads. I have watched them grow up and struggle to understand how to fit their "shadow" culture and world into the story of their lives. And so, I decided to write a novel about one such young woman, who was adopted from a Latin American orphanage, where her name was Milagros (Miracles). She has since become a totally American girl, Milly Kaufman, who doesn't know how to connect to her past and, therefore, avoids it. But one day a refugee from her birth country, Pablo, appears in her class. His presence becomes a challenge and a means for Milly to find Milagros and connect with her whole story.

Fiction about political subjects is a tricky thing, and when the readers are young, even more so. My young protagonist, Anita (in honor of her namesake Anne Frank), is coming of age in a dictatorship in Latin America, not unlike the one we left behind in the Dominican Republic. When her father gets taken away by the secret police, Anita and her mother go into hiding in order to avoid capture. Anita, of course, keeps a diary.

I've often described this book as a "green fable and love story." The book grew out of a project Bill and I started in the Dominican Republic: an organic coffee farm modeling sustainable methods with a school on site to teach basic reading and writing. There's now a new Spanish/English edition, A Cafecito Story/El cuento del cafecito. One of the special moments of my writing life happened when we took this bilingual edition down to the farm, and our once illiterate neighbors were able to read passages in which their names appeared! See website at cafealtagracia.com. Also, check out some of the woodcuts by Belkis Ramirez.

As a little girl growing up in the Dominican Republic, I remember hearing stories of the ciguapas. (See-goo-ah-pas.) This tribe of beautiful women live underwater but come out at night to hunt for food. No one has ever been able to track them down because they have a special secret. I'd lie in bed, struggling to stay awake, hoping to spot one. I never did, until I wrote this story about one little-girl ciguapa, Guapita, who almost gives away the special secret by befriending a human boy. The illustrations by the Italian artist, Fabian Negrin, are fabulous.